In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be in the long run consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s arms close to the beginning of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the whole challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you’ll be higher off when you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to permit not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar project – you possibly can and should start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the mission. However, in the event you wait to start marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow no less than a couple of extra weeks, perhaps more, to your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing mission starts once you hand off all of the photos, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner if you have a selected deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability permit just a little additional time – possibly a month in total – for manufacturing.
